First off, is there a way to make my character pose in a frog type crouching position, as if he's warming his hands at a camp fire?

Don't believe you can, but if you have console access, you're on PC, and there are several mods that provide the capability.

the JB Puppeteer mod has a couch exactly as you describe.

FWIW, I think that's a vanilla pose, so you don't even need an FNIS-based pose mod.

FNIS (Fore's New Idles in Skyrim) is required to add brand-new animations to the game. It contains code to update the Havok behavior graphs for the characters.

That's what I thought. It's a vanilla pose that I believe I've seen NPCs doing.

You can run player.playidle [idlename] from the console, but you have to know the name of that idle. UESP has a list. There are around 4000. Have fun!


(I've actually done this, went through the list and wrote down any likely sounding ones. Not all of them will actually work).